Equals: Joe Silver
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Actor: Joe Silver
Role: Felix Dzershinsky, aka. The Guy No One Cares About Except For The Equalizer
Episode: 1x03, "The Defector"
Best known for: As so many of us know, Joe Silver played Captain Jet in Space Funnies from 1955-1960. He also appeared in David Cronenberg's Rabid as Murray Cypher, a name so Cronenbergian that I think Cronenberg had to fight Don DeLillo in an arena on a distant planet to get it.
Did he appear on Law & Order?: Joe Silver died in 1989, which puts him just outside the L&O umbrella.
Robert Urich check: Silver was a guest star on Spenser: For Hire as Guzman in "In a Safe Place". Speaking of Guzmans, Luis Guzman showed up as an unlicensed cab driver on the very next episode of The Equalizer after "The Defector." Coincidence? Well, yeah. Obviously.
Every episode of The Equalizer is a smorgasbord of incredible guest star talent (except that you may not eat the talent, as you'd except from a smorgasbord of anything). The toughest part of this column is just picking one out of several great actors that seem to pop up constantly. Just by way of example, in episode four alone I had the pleasure of choosing between Luis Guzman, Adam Ant and Lori Petty. Or J.T. Walsh.
In the case of "The Defector," though, it was immediately clear that the subject of Equals should be Joe Silver. I mean, look at that face.
What can I say? That is the face of Joe Silver, the actor who got his start in a role in "Tobacco Road" and worked in shows like "Mr. I. Magination" (Imagine trying to get a show with a name like "Mr. I. Magination" on air nowadays. Mr. P. Laytime? No, let's not do that. Mr. F. Unnibal? My god, what would a funnibal even be?). He was described by a radio announcer as having a voice "so low that when he speaks, he unties your shoelaces." That strikes me as a bit of a nuisance, but it's a great line.
In "The Defector," Silver plays Felix Dzershinsky, a minor functionary at the Soviet embassy and former CIA asset. In the opening moments of the episode, Felix spots a high-ranking KGB agent and contacts his old handler to pass on the information. His handler is - you guessed it - The Equalizer, who now has to convince his former boss to pay attention to Felix and help him defect.
To The Equalizer's disgust, nobody cares about Felix. Every other character in the episode refers to him "a little man" or a "nobody," which infuriates The Equalizer and drives him to recite bitter monologues about the many moral compromises he's had to make over the years.
As for Felix, he dies.
There he is, dying. In the first act. Just as he's about to defect, a Soviet agent wielding a shotgun takes him out.
The question is: does this make The Equalizer really angry? You bet it does. It also drives him to rescue Felix's daughter Irina (Melissa Leo!) from certain abduction. It leads to a shootout in the country where Soviet heavies are hit by bullets and respond by flinging themselves through glass doors and tumbling abruptly down staircases.
If Silver and Leo weren't enough, the show also shoehorns in Robert Joy as a young CIA agent who first draws The Equalizer's scorn, and later, his grudging admiration. Joy's sunken eyes and shelf of a forehead are one of the great pleasure of late 20th century television.
Look at that cocky young Turk, thinking he can face off with The Equalizer.
Having Felix die so quickly is an unexpected and bold move. This is only a guess on my part, but Silver may have already been suffering from the liver cancer that would kill him a few years later. In the first scene, he is visibly winded from climbing a set of stairs, and he looks pitifully thin and shrunken in his suit. Silver's obvious illness lends a strange sense of tragedy to the repeated insults heaped on his character.
Along with the Le Carre-esque Cold War plot, "The Defector" throws in a B-story about a kid (a spectacularly bad J.D. Roth) getting bullied by a group of unconvincing high school thugs. After some false starts and black eyes, the kid stands up for himself with a few Equalizer-taught moves and the group of bullies folds. Somehow, both his father and The Equalizer are on the scene (there's some serious dream logic at work here) to witness his transition from shy child to aggressive young man. The Equalizer even gives him a thumbs-up, but it looks a little odd because the angle of the camera places his thumb directly in front of his nose. It makes The Equalizer look as if he's subconsciously embarrassed by his own nose, and it suggests that his nose is part thumb. Or maybe he got a little careless with the superglue and now he's in permanent thumbs-up mode.
Imagine Edward Woodward being so pleased with your conduct that he glues his nose to his thumb in your honour. We should all be so lucky.
